6 research outputs found
Evolutionary psycholinguistic approach to the pragmatics of reference
Pragmatics concerns the material function of language use in the world, and thus
touches on profound questions about the relationship between our cognition and the
environments in which we operate. Both psycholinguistics and evolutionary linguistics
have afforded greater attention to pragmatics in recent years. Though the potential
of evolutionary psycholinguistics has been noted for over twenty-five years (e.g.
Tooby & Cosmides, 1990; Scott-Phillips, 2010a), there has arguably been little dialogue
between these two fields of study. This thesis explicitly acknowledges and investigates
the adaptationist nature of functional claims in psycholinguistics, and attempts
to demonstrate that psycholinguistic inquiry can provide evidence that is relevant to
theories of how the cognitive architecture of linguistic communication evolved.
Chapter two reviews a broad polarisation in the pragmatic and psycholinguistic literature
concerning the relative roles of linguistic convention and contextual information
in comprehension. It makes explicit the theoretical approaches that reliably give
rise to these polar positions across scholarly domains. It goes on to map each model of
comprehension to the adaptationist particulars it may entail, and in doing so illustrates
two different pictures of how linguistic cognition has developed over phylogeny. The
Social Adaptation Hypothesis (SAH) holds that linguistic comprehension is performed
by relevance-oriented inferential mechanisms that have been selected for by a social
environment (i.e. inference-using conspecifics). In particular, the SAH holds that linguistic
conventions are attended to in the same way as other ostensive stimuli and
contextual information, and because of their relevance to communicative interactions.
The Linguistic Adaptation Hypothesis (LAH) holds that linguistic comprehension is
performed by specialised cognition that has been selected for by a linguistic environment
(i.e. language-using conspecifics) that was established subsequent to, and as a
consequence of, the emergence of inferential communication. In particular, the LAH
holds that linguistic conventions are a privileged domain of input for the comprehension
system. The plausibility and congruence of both accounts with the current state
of knowledge about the evolutionary picture necessitates empirical psycholinguistic
evidence.
The remainder of the thesis presents a series of experiments investigating referential
expressions relevant to the contrastive predictions of these two adaptationist accounts.
The broad question that covers all of these experiments is: how sensitive is the
comprehension process to linguistic input qua linguistic input, relative to various other
grades of relevant contextual information?
Chapter three presents a reaction time experiment that uses speaker-specific facts
about referents as referring expressions, in a conversational precedent paradigm. The
experiment measures the relative sensitivity of comprehension processing to the knowledge
states of speakers and the consistent use of linguistic labels, and finds greater
sensitivity to linguistic labels.
Chapter four introduces a further contextual variable into this paradigm, in the form
of culturally copresent associations between labels and referents. The experiment presented
in this chapter compares the relative sensitivity of processing to culturally copresent
common ground, the privileged knowledge state of speakers, and the consistent
use of linguistic labels. The results indicated greater sensitivity to linguistic labels
overall, and were consistent with the LAH.
Chapter five turns to visual context as a constraint on reference, and presents two
pairs of experiments. Experiments 3 and 4 investigate the comprehension of referring
expressions across congruous, incongruous, and abstract visual contexts. The experiments
measured reaction time as subjects were prompted to identify constituent parts
of tangram pictures. The results indicated a sensitivity to the visual context and the
linguistic labels, and are broadly consistent with the SAH. If comprehension is characterised
by particular sensitivities, we may expect speakers to produce utterances that
lend themselves well to how hearers process them. Experiments 5 and 6 use a similar
tangram paradigm to elicit referring expressions from speakers for component parts
of tangrams. The experiments measure the consistency of produced labels for the
same referents across visual contexts of varied congruity. The results indicated some
methodological limitations of the tangram paradigm for the study of repeated reference
across contexts.
Lastly, the thesis concludes by considering the SAH and LAH in light of the empirical
evidence presented and its accompanying limitations, and argues that the evidence
is generally consistent with the assumptions of the LAH
Mirror Neurons, Prediction and Hemispheric Coordination; The Prioritizing of Intersubjectivity over ‘Intrasubjectivity’
We observe that approaches to intersubjectivity, involving mirror neurons and involving emulation
and prediction, have eclipsed discussion of those same mechanisms for achieving coordination between the two hemispheres of the human brain. We explore some of the implications of the suggestion that the mutual modelling of the two situated hemispheres (each hemisphere ‘second guessing’ the other) is a productive place to start in understanding the phylogenetic and ontogenetic development of cognition and of intersubjectivity
Scotland as an Independent Small State: Where would it seek shelter?
A planned referendum in 2014 on Scottish independence gives cause to examine that scenario in the light of small state studies and recent European experience. One of the best-supported assumptions in small state literature is that small countries need to form alliances and seek protection from larger neighboring states and/or international institutions. Small European states have generally sought shelter from the European Union (EU) and NATO. This study confirms that an independent Scotland would need strategic, political, economic and societal shelter, and could look for the various elements within existing European institutions, from its closest southern and northern neightbours, and from the US. However, protection may come with a certain cost - just as union with another entity does at present
Smooth Signals and Syntactic Change
A large body of recent work argues that considerations of information density predict various phenomena in linguistic planning and production. However, the usefulness of an information theoretic account for explaining diachronic phenomena has remained under-explored. Here, we test the idea that speakers prefer informationally uniform utterances on diachronic data from historical English and Icelandic. Our results show that: (i) the information density approach allows us to predict that Subject and Object type will affect the frequencies of OV and VO in specific ways, creating a complex Constant Rate Effect, (ii) the bias towards information uniformity explains this CRE and may help to explain others, and (iii) communities of speakers are constant in their average target level of information uniformity over long periods of historical time. This finding is consistent with an understanding of this bias which places it deep in the human language faculty and the human faculty for communication
Scotland as an Independent Small State: Where would it seek shelter?
FræðigreinA planned referendum in 2014 on Scottish independence gives cause to examine that scenario in the light of small state studies and recent European experience. One of the best-supported assumptions in small state literature is that small countries need to form alliances and seek protection from larger neighboring states and/or international institutions. Small European states have generally sought shelter from the European Union (EU) and NATO. This study confirms that an independent Scotland would need strategic, political, economic and societal shelter, and could look for the various elements within existing European institutions, from its closest southern and northern neightbours, and from the US. However, protection may come with a certain cost - just as union with another entity does at present